We pushed it with an almost nine-hour driving day to get from Wellington to Matamata. We encountered some bad luck finding a decent parking spot and settled on a rest stop with other squatting campers. I asked a dreadlocked Frenchman if he knew if it was a legal spot. He said he had no idea, but since there were others parked there... We were so worn out we went with this logic and pulled out some dinner. A couple sips of wine later, we began fantasizing a knock at the door at 5am with a $300 fine. This rallied enough energy in us to pack back up and find a more legitimate spot.
Deep in the section on the bylaws of freedom camping in Matamata, our NZMCA guide book hooked us up with this unexciting blacktop square next to a rugby field. We spent the next two nights among breeze-dancing McDonald's food wrappers and squawking Indian mynas, but there was a a playground next to it!
We were in need of a rest after all the rush to the northern parts of the north island, so we hung out in Patty, watching movies and eating a lot of these candies. They are Heards, "A trusted Kiwi energy source," to be precise. With their vibrant fruitiness, they are our newest Kiwi addiction.
On Monday morning Alex woke up with giddy anticipation for our upcoming tour of Hobbiton, the location of the Shire in all of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. Until 1998 Matamata was a fairly ordinary, nondescript town in the country side. Now it has embraced the onslaught of LOTR tourism. As profits poured in, the iSite building was fully revamped to be photo worthy in and of itself.
We hopped a tour bus from here and made our way the 20 minutes out to the farm that holds Hobbiton. It is no wonder this site was chosen. The farm has huge rolling hills and makes a gorgeous, secluded setting for filming. The NZ government was so keen to have LOTR filmed here that they gave their armed forces the task of building the roads to access the set. And to protect secrecy, they instituted a no-fly zone around the area during filming, threatening lifetime loss of license to any pilot who breached the boundary.
The tour was really a glorified photo-op for nerds like us to come and pose like hobbits and as filler the guide shared behind-the-scenes trivia. There were different sized hobbit holes made, for example, to make a Hobbit look small or make Gandalf look big.
The set for the first three movies was constructed out of temporary materials like Styrofoam, but for the Hobbit it was made far sturdier to serve tourists like us for decades to come.
We could see the attention to detail in all of the props set out. Most of the plants are real and continue to have full time gardeners maintain them. The veggies were planted for the film from seed. They were given pesticides to protect them from possums and growth hormones to make Hobbits small in comparison. It took 18 months to achieve the full garden. On the other hand, they made sure to eliminate any native plants that look too distinctly NZ instead of Brittan. To make plum trees look right, they brought in foreign apple trees that are short enough for halflings and plucked off all the fruit and leaves. Then they glued on leaves and plastic plums.
The clothes on the lines were put out fresh each day of filming in order to properly mat down grass for an accurate feel. All the hobbit-sized clothes and tools were, of course, adorable.
Samwise Gamgee's!
I regret I did not witness Alex when he took in Bag End. At this time I was actually trying to stay near the tour guide and the main pack of photo takers, but my boyfriend pulled up the rear with his desire to capture every last Hobbit hole unobstructed by random German or British full-sized humans.
He had such a stranger snap his portrait in front of Bilbo and Frodo's home. I was sad to have rushed along so much and stuck with my partner from there on out.
Admittedly, this was easy because the next stop was the Green Dragon for a alfling pint of hard cider! Our tour guide just so happened to be a grad student in music and she whipped out her flute and entertained us with "Concerning Hobbits" from the film score. She was wonderful.
Ouch!
Someone is definitely not a Hobbit.
We did get to pose inside a Hobbit home. This one, like all of them, was unfurnished: the inside sequences were filmed in-studio in Wellington.
And that was it. Just to feel Alex's boyish excitement was worth the $75 tickets for our two hours in the Shire. We headed back to Patty from there and made our way to the Coramandel for a big shift in gears.
Merci as always for giving mon anglais your efforts. Hugs and bisous!
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